Traditionally, the identity of a microorganism in a given sample has been established by isolating the organism, culturing the organism in a suitable culture medium, and identifying the cultured organism based on biochemical, immunological, and/or other properties.
Because such broad-based culture methods can be laborious and are often slow to yield results, newer molecular biological and immunological methods have emerged that focus on, among other things, the detection of genome nucleic acids, detection of proteins specific to certain microorganisms, and the detection of antibodies directed against certain microorganisms, as means to identify microorganisms in samples tested.
However, despite such progress, there remains a need in the art for rapid, sensitive, and accurate methods for determining the presence of microorganisms in a sample.